Putting the extra 128mb ram aside, is the 6800GS much faster? The 6600GT while only 8pipes runs at 525 core where as the 6800GS with 12pipes runs at 370. Reading that kinda leads me to believe the actually real world performance difference would be very little or am I wrong? I know the GS has the 256bit mem but just focusing on the core itself I'm curious about.

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The 6800GS should be significantly faster in newer games. Plus they seem to overclock extremely well, so if you do that, you'll get another big boost. As far as the memory bandwidth, that makes a huge difference. As far as I know, it has around double the bandwidth of the 6600GT, which makes it MUCH better at higher resolutions or with antialiasing. Plus, they always have 256Mb of RAM which also makes it possible to play games more smoothly with higher detail settings without any stuttering or large framerate drops.

If you have a choice between the two, deffinitely get the 6800GS. I wouldnt honestly recommend that anyone get anything slower than that if they want decent gaming performance in new games.

The 6800GS are actually 6800GT cores for agp. A select few unlock to 16 pipes and 6 vertex shaders. Im pretty sure the BFG one does and the XFX xxx edition one does too. The 7800GS isn't that much faster once you unlock the 6800GS.

The 6800GS are actually 6800GT cores for agp. A select few unlock to 16 pipes and 6 vertex shaders. Im pretty sure the BFG one does and the XFX xxx edition one does too. The 7800GS isn't that much faster once you unlock the 6800GS.

Once you unlock the pipes and overclock it then it will be close, but once you add overclocking to the 7800GS it overtakes the 6800GS significantly. Plus the 7800GS has a better feature set.

As for the original question, if it has to be 6600GT or 6800GS, then 6800GS. If you have a couple extra bucks the 7800GS.